The remarkable thing is that Calomel has so far met with so little argument.
This is quite an undertaking that he's about, after all: he means to educate a sellsword on matters for which a short and brutal life has not much prepared her. He means to
convince her on some matter or another; the deliberate quality of his small motions has convinced Ariane of this very swiftly. She in turn gives him an attentive audience for these explanations, for the recounting of this
puzzle. Some half-smile answers his appreciation for the
jenever, a coarse brew if ever there was one, but no more than that: she will hear the man
speak.
For what he describes is a process of manipulation, and while this sits poorly with the woman, she is willing to make certain small concessions in the matter of Vraal. Not least because the frontal assault which is her preference is clearly useless against this one: Ignas Demonsbane had demonstrated this, however inadvertantly. 'Forsake', says Calomel, and this is a word which appeals. 'Stand aside', he continues, and discovers an audience that is in immediate approval, that understands this need very clearly indeed.
What follows is not nearly so straightforward.
Symbols! And he says this thing to a woman who wears particular colours pierced through her skin, who wears such elaborate patterns carved deep, deep beneath the surface of her flesh. Who in the purse at her hip carries two small rings of hammered silver, so that she is heavy with such
symbols, and were anyone at all to inquire Why, she would necessarily answer that she
does not know.
Perhaps she, too, must sometimes blindly follow her heart.
Calomel's education continues, and his student attends: frowns over the marks that he has made upon this paper, now-and-then chews absently at her meal. Frowns as if she meant to pierce the page with her gaze, and in some very loose sense this does happen, for there comes a moment in which the world moves very slightly about her. In which it grudgingly gives up this knowledge, and still Ariane is not sure of it, still she's not quite willing -- and still the notion
interests her. By the end of this talk, she has seized the page from Calomel entirely, a fingertip tracing the outlines of what he's drawn as if she could coax something from them. As the Constable frames his question, she is drawing that stick of charcoal from him, is sketching some small pattern of her own...
"Did you know," she murmurs meantime, and almost absently so - except that her upwards glance is heavy with some deliberate quality of its own. "Did you know that it was so
strange to me, when I first see Vraal's people. They wear those marks, mn? Upon their brows, you have surely seen it. And of course, I had seen it before; all of the Order had."
Ariane pauses then, setting charcoal aside, and offering some trace of a smile instead, as she turns the page around for Cinnabar's inspection. Upon it, she has drawn a single word.
Believe